That is how you hold your dear ones when they go to the other side of
the world. That is how you hold God, who dwells on the other side of the
stars. There is no way to 'have' Him, but through the understanding
accepting Him, and keeping firm hold of Him. Men and women that from
Monday morning to Saturday night never think of His name--how do they
possess God? And professing Christians that never remember Him all the
day long--what absurd hypocrisy it is for them to say that God is
theirs!

Yours, and never in your mind! When your husband, or your wife, or your
child, goes away from home for a week, do you forget them as utterly as
you forget God? Do you have them in any sense if they never dwell in the
'study of your imagination,' and never fill your thoughts with sweetness
and with light?

And so again when the heart turns to Him, and when all the faculties of
our being, will, hope, and imagination, and all our affections and all
our practical powers, when they all touch Him, each in its proper
fashion, then and then only can we in any reasonable and true sense be
said to possess God.

Thought, communion, sympathy, affection, moral likeness, practical
obedience, these are the way--and not by mystical raptures only--by
which, in simple prose fact, it is possible for the finite to grasp the
infinite, and for a man to be the _owner_ of God.

Now there is another consideration very necessary to be remembered, and
that is that this possession of God involves, and is possible only by, a
deliberate act of renunciation. The Levite's example, that is glanced at
in my text, is always our law. You must have no part or inheritance